THE LIVING DEAD

'Why seek ye the living among the dead! 6. He is not

here, but is risen.'--LUKE xxiv. 5,6.

We can never understand the utter desolation of the days that lay

betwixt Christ's Death and His Resurrection. Our faith rests on

centuries. We know that that grave was not even an interruption to

the progress of His work, but was the straight road to His triumph

and His glory. We know that it was the completion of the work of

which the raising of the widow's son and of Lazarus were but the

beginnings. But these disciples did not know that. To them the

inferior miracles by which He had redeemed others from the power of

the grave, must have made His own captivity to it all the more

stunning; and the thought which such miracles ending so must have

left upon them, must have been something like, 'He saved others;

Himself He cannot save.' And therefore we can never think ourselves

fully back to that burst of strange sudden thankfulness with which

these weeping Marys found those two calm angel forms sitting with

folded wings, like the Cherubim over the Mercy-seat, but

overshadowing a better propitiation, and heard the words of my text,

'Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is

risen.'

But yet, although the words before us, in the full depth and

preciousness of their meaning, of course could only be once

fulfilled, we may not only gather from them thoughts concerning that

one death and resurrection, but we may likewise apply them, in a

very permissible modification of meaning, to the present condition

of all who have departed in His faith and fear; since for us, too,

it is true that, whenever we go to an open grave, sorrowing for those

whom we love, or oppressed with the burden of mortality in any shape,

if our eyes are anointed, we can see there sitting the quiet angel

forms; and if our ears be purged from the noise of earth, we can hear

them saying to us, in regard to all that have gone away, 'Why seek ye

the living in these graves? They are not here; they are risen, as He

said.' The thoughts are very old, brethren. God be thanked that they

_are_ old! Perhaps to some of you they may come now with new power,

because they come with new application to your own present condition.

Perhaps to some of you they may sound very weak, and 'words weaker

than your grief will make grief more';--but such as they are, let us

look at them for a moment or two together now.

The first thought, then, that these words of the angel messengers,

and the scene in which we find them, suggest, is this--The dead are

the living.

Language, which is more accustomed and adapted to express the

appearances than the realities of things, leads us astray very much

when we use the phrase 'the dead' as if it expressed the continuance

of the condition into which men pass in the act of dissolution. It

misleads us no less, when we use it as if it expressed in itself the

whole truth even as to that act of dissolution. 'The dead' and 'the

living' are not names of two classes which exclude each other. Much

rather, there are _none_ who are _dead_. The dead are the living who

have died. Whilst they were dying they lived, and after they were dead

they lived more fully. All live unto God. 'God is not the God of the

dead, but of the living.' Oh, how solemnly sometimes that thought comes

up before us, that all those past generations which have stormed across

this earth of ours, and then have fallen into still forgetfulness, live

yet. Somewhere at this very instant, they now verily _are_! We say,

'They _were_, they _have been_'. There are no have beens! Life is life

for ever. _To be_ is eternal being. Every man that has died is at this

instant in the full possession of all his faculties, in the intensest

exercise of all his capacities, standing somewhere in God's great

universe, ringed with the sense of God's presence, and feeling in

every fibre of his being that life, which comes after death, is not less

real, but more real, not less great, but more great, not less full or

intense, but more full and intense, than the mingled life which, lived

here on earth, was a centre of life surrounded with a crust and

circumference of mortality. The dead are the living. They lived whilst

they died; and after they die, they live on for ever.

Such a conviction has as a matter of fact been firmly grasped as an

unquestionable truth and a familiar operative belief only within the

sphere of the Christian revelation. From the natural point of view

the whole region of the dead is 'a land of darkness, without any

order, where the light is as darkness.' The usual sources of human

certainty fail us here. Reason is only able to stammer a

peradventure. Experience and consciousness are silent. 'The simple

senses' can only say that it looks as if Death were an end, the

final Omega. Testimony there is none from any pale lips that have

come back to unfold the secrets of the prison-house.

The history of Christ's Death and Resurrection, His dying words

'_This day_ thou shalt be with Me in Paradise,' the full

identity of being with which He rose from the grave, the manhood

changed and yet the same, the intercourse of the forty days before

His ascension, which showed the continuance of all the old love

'stronger than death,' and was in all essential points like His

former intercourse with His disciples, though changed in form and

introductory to the times when they should see Him no more in the

flesh-these teach us, not as a peradventure, nor as a dim hope, nor

as a strong foreboding which may be in its nature prophetic, but as

a certainty based upon a historical fact, that Death's empire is

partial in its range and transitory in its duration. But, after we

are convinced of that, we can look again with new eyes even on the

external accompaniments of death, and see that sense is too hasty in

its conclusion that death is the final end. There is no reason from

what we see passing before our eyes then to believe, that it, with

all its pitifulness and all its pain, has any power at all upon the

soul. True, the spirit gathers itself into itself, and, poising

itself for its flight, becomes oblivious of what is passing round

about it. True, the tenant that is about to depart from the house in

which he has dwelt so long, closes the windows before he goes. But

what is there in the cessation of the power of communication with an

outer world--what is there in the fact that you clasp the nerveless

hand, and it returns no pressure; that you whisper gentle words that

you think might kindle a soul under the dull, cold ribs of death

itself, and get no answer--that you look with weeping gaze to catch

the response of affection from out of the poor filmy, closing,

tearless eyes there, and look in vain--what is there in all that to

lead to the conviction that _the spirit_ is participant of that

impotence and silence? Is not the soul only self-centring itself,

retiring from, the outposts, but not touched in the citadel? Is it

not only that as the long sleep of life begins to end, and the

waking eye of the soul begins to open itself on realities, the

sights and sounds of the dream begin to pass away? Is it not but

that the man, in dying, begins to be what he fully is when he is

dead, 'dead unto sin,' dead unto the world, that he may 'live unto

God' that he may live with God, that he may live really? And so we

can look upon that ending of life, and say, 'It is a very small

thing; it only cuts off the fringes of my life, it does not touch

_me_ at all' It only plays round about the husk, and does not

get at the core. It only strips off the circumferential mortality,

but the soul rises up untouched by it, and shakes the bands of death

from off its immortal arms, and flutters the stain of death from

off its budding wings, and rises fuller of life _because of

death_, and mightier in its vitality in the very act of

submitting the body to the law, 'Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt

thou return.'

Touching but a part of the being, and touching that but for a

moment, death is no state, it is an act. It is not a condition, it

is a transition. Men speak about life as 'a narrow neck of land,

betwixt two unbounded seas': they had better speak about death as

that. It is an isthmus, narrow and almost impalpable, on which, for

one brief instant, the soul poises itself; whilst behind it there

lies the inland lake of past being, and before it the shoreless

ocean of future life, all lighted with the glory of God, and making

music as it breaks even upon these dark, rough rocks. Death is but a

passage. It is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a

door on its inner side. We roll the stone to its mouth and come

away, thinking that we have left them there till the Resurrection.

But when the outer access to earth is fast closed, the inner portal

that opens on heaven is set wide, and God says to His child, 'Come,

enter into thy chambers and shut thy doors about thee ... until the

indignation be overpast!' Death is a superficial thing, and a

transitory thing--a darkness that is caused by the light, and a

darkness that ends in the light--a trifle, if you measure it by

duration; a trifle if you measure it by depth. The death of the mortal

is the emancipation and the life of the immortal. Then, brethren, we

may go with the words of my text, and look upon every green hillock

below which any that are dear to us are lying, and say to ourselves,

'Not _here_--God be thanked, no--not here: living, and not dead;

_yonder_, with the Master!' Oh, we think far too much of the grave,

and far too little of the throne and the glory! We are far too much

the creatures of sense; and the accompaniments of dissolution and

departure fill up our hearts and our eyes. Think them all away,

believe them all away, love them all away. Stand in the light of

Christ's life, and Christ's death, and Christ's rising, till you

feel, 'Thou art a shadow, not a substance--no real thing at all.'

Yes, a shadow; and where a shadow falls there must be sunlight above

to cast it. Look up, then, above the shadow Death, above the sin and

separation from God, of which it is the shadow! Look up to the

unsetting light of the Eternal life on the throne of the universe,

and see bathed in it the living dead in Christ!

God has taken them to Himself, and we ought not to think (if we

would think as the Bible speaks) of death as being anything else

than the transitory thing which breaks down the brazen walls and

lets us into liberty. For, indeed, if you will examine the New

Testament on this subject, I think you will be surprised to find how

very seldom--scarcely ever--the word 'death' is employed to express

the mere fact of the dissolution of the connection between soul and

body. It is strange, but significant, that the Apostles, and Christ

Himself, so rarely use the word to express that which we exclusively

mean by it. They use all manner of other expressions as if they felt

that the _fact_ remains, but that all that made it death has

gone away. In a real sense, and all the more real because the

external fact continues, Christ 'hath abolished death.' Two men may go

down to the grave together: of one this may be the epitaph, 'He that

believeth in Christ shall never die'; and of the other--passing through

precisely the same physical experience and appearance, the dissolution

of soul and body, we may say,--'There, that is death--death as God

sent it, to be the punishment of man's sin.' The outward fact remains

the same, the whole inner character of it is altered. As to them that

believe, though they have passed through the experience of painful

separation--slow, languishing departure, or suddenly being caught up

in some chariot of fire; not only are they living now, but they never

died at all! Have you understood 'death' in the full, pregnant sense

of the expression, which means not only that _shadow_, the

separation of the body from the soul; but that _reality_, the

separation of the soul from life, because of the separation of the

soul from God?

Then, secondly, this text, indeed the whole incident, may set before

us the other consideration that since they have died, they live a

better life than ours.

I am not going to enter here, at any length, or very particularly,

into what seem to me to be the irrefragable scriptural grounds for

holding the complete, uninterrupted, and even intensified

consciousness of the soul of man, in the interval between death and

the Resurrection. 'Absent from the body, present with the Lord.'

'This day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.' These words, if there

were none other, are surely enough; seeing that of all that dark

region we know only what it pleases God to tell us in the Bible, and

seeing that it does not please Him to give us more than hints and

glimpses of any part of it. But putting aside all attempts to

elaborate a full doctrine of the intermediate state from the few

Scripture expressions that bear on it, I merely allege, in general

terms, that the present life of departed saints is fuller and nobler

than that which they possessed on earth. They are even now, whatever

be the details of their condition, 'the spirits of just men made

perfect.' As yet the body is not glorified--but the spirits of the

perfected righteous are now parts of that lofty society whose head

is Christ, whose members are the angels of God, the saints on earth

and the equally conscious redeemed who 'sleep in Jesus.'

In what particulars is their life now higher than it was? First,

they have close fellowship with Christ; then, they are separated

from this present body of weakness, of dishonour, of corruption;

then, they are withdrawn from all the trouble, and toil, and care of

this present life; and then, and not least surely, they have death

behind them, not having that awful figure standing on their horizon

waiting for them to come up with it. These are some of the elements

of the life of the sainted dead. What a wondrous advance on the life

of earth they reveal if we think of them! They are closer to Christ;

they are delivered from the body, as a source of weakness; as a

hinderer of knowledge; as a dragger-down of all the aspiring

tendencies of the soul; as a source of sin; as a source of pain.

They are delivered from all the necessity of labour which is agony,

of labour which is disproportionate to strength, of labour which

often ends in disappointment, of labour which is wasted so often in

mere keeping life in, of labour which at the best is a curse, though

it be a merciful curse too. They are delivered from that 'fear of

death' which, though it be stripped of its sting, is never

extinguished in any soul of man that lives; and they can smile at

the way in which that narrow and inevitable passage bulked so large

before them all their days, and after all, when they came to it, was

so slight and small! If these are parts of the life of them that

'sleep in Jesus,' if they are fuller of knowledge, fuller of wisdom,

fuller of love and capacity of love, and object of love; fuller of

holiness, fuller of energy, and yet full of rest from head to foot;

if all the hot tumult of earthly experience is stilled and quieted,

all the fever beating of this blood of ours for ever at an end; all

the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' done with for ever,

and if the calm face which we looked last upon, and out of which the

lines of sorrow, and pain, and sickness melted away, giving it a

nobler nobleness than we had ever seen upon it in life, is only an

image of the restful and more blessed being into which they have

passed,--if the dead are thus, then 'Blessed are the dead!'

No wonder that one aspect of that blessedness--the '_sleeping_

in Jesus'--has been the one that the weary have laid hold of at all

times; but do not let us forget what lies even in that figure of

sleep, or distort it as if it meant to express a less vivid life

than that here below. I think we sometimes misunderstand what the

Bible means when it speaks about death as a sleep, by taking it to

express the idea that that intermediate state is one of a kind of

depressed consciousness, and of a less full vitality than the

present. Not so. Sleep is rest, that is one reason for the

scriptural application of the word to death. Sleep is the cessation

of all connection with the external world, that is another reason.

As we play with the names of those that are familiar to us, so a

loving faith can venture to play, as it were, with the awful name of

Him who is King of Terrors, and to minimise it down to that shadow

and reflection of itself which we find in the nightly act of going

to rest. That may be another reason. But sleep is not unconsciousness;

sleep does not touch the spirit. Sleep sets us free from relations to

the outer world but the soul works as hard, though in a different way,

when we slumber as when we wake. People who know what it is to dream,

ought never to fancy that when the Bible talks about death as sleep, it

means to say to us that death is unconsciousness. By no means. Strip the

man of the disturbance that comes from a fevered body, and he will have

a calmer soul. Strip him of the hindrances that come from a body which

is like an opaque tower around his spirit, with only a narrow slit here

and a narrow door there--five poor senses, with which he can come into

connection with an outer universe; and, then surely, the spirit will have

wider avenues out to God, and larger powers of reception, because it

has lost the earthly tabernacle which, just in proportion as it brought

the spirit into connection with the earth to which the tabernacle

belongs, severed its connection with the heavens that are above.

They who have died in Christ live a fuller and a nobler life, by the

very dropping away of the body; a fuller and a nobler life, by the

very cessation of care, change, strife and struggle; and, above all,

a fuller and nobler life, because they 'sleep _in Jesus_,' and

are gathered into His bosom, and wake with Him yonder beneath the

altar, clothed in white robes, and with palms in their hands,

'waiting the adoption--to wit, the redemption of the body.' For

though death be a progress--a progress to the spiritual existence;

though death be a birth to a higher and nobler state; though it be

the gate of life, fuller and better than any which we possess;

though the present state of the departed in Christ is a state of

calm blessedness, a state of perfect communion, a state of rest and

satisfaction;--yet it is not the final and perfect state, either.

And, therefore, in the last place, the better life, which the dead

in Christ are living now, leads on to a still fuller life when they

get back their glorified bodies.

The perfection of man is body, soul, and spirit. That is man, as God

made him. The spirit perfected, the soul perfected, without the

bodily life, is but part of the whole. For the future world, in all

its glory, we have the firm basis laid that it, too, is to be in a

real sense a material world, where men once more are to possess

bodies as they did before, only bodies through which the spirit

shall work conscious of no disproportion, bodies which shall be fit

servants and adequate organs of the immortal souls within, bodies

which shall never break down, bodies which shall never hem in nor

refuse to obey the spirits that dwell in them, but which shall add

to their power, and deepen their blessedness, and draw them closer

to the God whom they serve and the Christ after the likeness of

whose glorious body they are fashioned and conformed. 'Body, soul,

and spirit,' the old combination which was on earth, is to be the

perfect humanity of heaven. The spirits that are perfected, that are

living in blessedness, that are dwelling in God, that are sleeping

in Christ, at this moment are waiting, stretching out (I say, not

longing, but) expectant hands of faith and hope; for that they would

not be unclothed, but clothed upon with their house which is from

heaven, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.

We have nothing to say, now and here, about what that bodily

condition may be--about the differences and the identities between

it and our present earthly house of this tabernacle. Only

_this_ we know-reverse all the weakness of flesh, and you get

some faint notion of the glorious body. It is sown in corruption,

dishonour, and weakness. It is raised in incorruption, glory, and

power. Nay, more, it is sown a natural body, fit organ for the

animal life or nature, which stands connected with this material

universe; 'it is raised a spiritual body,' fit servant for the

spirit that dwells in it, that works through it, that is perfected

in its redemption.

Why, then, seek the living among the dead? 'God giveth His beloved

sleep'; and in that peaceful sleep, realities, not dreams, come

round their quiet rest, and fill their conscious spirits and their

happy hearts with blessedness and fellowship. And when thus lulled

to sleep in the arms of Christ they have rested till it please Him

to accomplish the number of His elect, then, in His own time, He

will make the eternal morning to dawn, and the hand that kept them

in their slumber shall touch them into waking, and shall clothe them

when they arise according to the body of His own glory; and they

looking into His face, and flashing back its love, its light, its

beauty, shall each break forth into singing as the rising light of

that unsetting day touches their transfigured and immortal heads, in

the triumphant thanksgiving 'I am satisfied, for I awake in Thy

likeness.'

'Therefore, comfort one another with these words,' and remember that

_we_ are of the day, not of the night; let us not, then, sleep

as do others; but let us reckon that Christ hath died for us, that

whether we wake on earth or sleep in the grave, or wake in heaven,

we may live together with Him!